A static test is an activity that evaluates quality based on a source code and intermediate deliverables without executing a test subject. A static test subject includes system resources such as design documents and programs. The static test for design documents is classified into a semantic check and a formal check. In the semantic check, a technique such as review and inspection is employed. The formal check comprises verification of consistency among deliverables, validation of traceability, verification of description, omission of fixed form items, and detection of overlapped descriptions, among several others.
In a large-scale development project, such as one with 600 or more participants in the design phase, a static test specification is manually prepared as needed and performs a consistency check of design documents. This typically causes several problems. For example, the correspondence between the error and its cause can be unclear. In some cases multiple OR conditions are described in text that shows a check specification outputting a same error number, which means that a developer cannot use the indicated error number to uniquely identify the cause. There can also be problems with variation in text style. With regard to similar content checks, specifications and error messages are described with different text styles. Since a Global Delivery (“GD”) member sometimes describes the specification, some expressions are hard to understand in some languages.
Those who refer to the specification text of the test include not only developers of the test tool and practitioners of the test, but also a number of developers that modify design documents upon receiving the test results. Low quality and unclear specification text may impact work efficiency across the entire project.